A little introduction: I’m working on some legacy VB.NET & Excel project. Pretty old stuff, quite the challenge of getting through the code. I’ve discovered multiple things about VB.NET which I didn’t knew (like the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace, late binding, Option Strict).

The code I’m working with is cluttered with these kinds of abominations to the .NET framework. The Microsoft.VisualBasic is purely there for legacy VBA developers so that they can easily transfer to VB.NET.

But that doesn’t mean you need to use it in new projects (vbNullString? C’mon…)

I think that this namespace shouldn’t be offered by default anymore in new VB.NET projects. It should be there to merely quickly convert old VBA projects to .NET.

Late binding is another thing which I truly hate. It gets compiled to a bunch of reflection calls which make your code more error prone (no compiler checking!). Although I’ve managed to cast the System.__ComObject to it’s corresponding interface most of the time I had to resort to reflection one time myself (shame shame).

And finally there is this problem of cluttered code, for some reason, when I look at VB.NET code there is SO much text and all the essence get’s lost! While the C# code is so clean.

I will write a post about cleaning up With statements + best practices for nested With Statements from VB.NET code pretty soon.